California and the Fictions of Capital doc

CALIFORNIA & THE
FICTIONS OF CAPITAL

CALIFORNIA & THE
FICTIONS OF CAPITAL
George L. Henderson
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
1999
135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta
Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul
Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai
Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1999 by George L. Henderson
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Henderson, George L., 1958–
California and the fictions of capital / George L. Henderson.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-510890-6
1. American literature—California—History and criticism.
2. Capitalism and literature—California. 3. California—Historical
geography. 4. California—Economic conditions. 5. Capital—
California—History. I. Title.
PS283.C2H46 1999
810.9'32794—dc21 97-52308
Contents
Introduction: The Alchemy of Capital and Nature ix
Why the Late Nineteenth-Century Countryside? xii
The Discourse of Rural Realism xiii
Why Rural Realism, Why the Novel? xv
Stalking the Interdisciplinary Wilds xvii
Reference Maps xxi
PART I Making Geographies
1 Rural Commodity Regimes: A Primer 3
The Logics and Illogics of Production: The Shift to and
out of Grain 4
The Regime of Specialty Crops 7
A Wider Division of Labor: The Country in the City 18
2 Nature and Fictitious Capital: The Circulation of Money Capital 28
Capitalism and Nature: The Agrarian Nexus 28
Axis One: The Mann-Dickinson Thesis, Nature as Obstacle 30
Axis Two: Exploiting the Natural Obstacle 32
Keeping Capitalism Out or Letting Capital In?
Marx on Circulation 34
Blurred Boundaries and Fugitive Bodies 38
Nature and Circulation 42

Capital, Nature, and the Space-Time of Agro-Credits
in the United States 44
Capital, Nature, and the Space-Time of Agro-Credits
in California 52
Conclusion: Reading the Landscape of Fictitious Capital 77
vi INTRODUCTION
3 Toward Rural Realism: Variable Capital, Variable Capitalists, 81
and the Fictions of Capital
The Way to Get Farm Labor? 81
The Ever-New, Ever-Same, 1: Continuity of Wage Labor and
Changes in the Wage Labor Market 83
The Ever-New, Ever Same, 2: Resistance and Reaction 87
Racializing the Working Body and Multicultural Racism 90
Toward Rural Realism: An Agrarianism without Illusions? 96
Variable Capitalists All: Capitalist Laborers and
the Fictions of Capital in Country and City 104
Coda: The Labor of Fiction 112
PART II Excavating Geographical Imaginations
Introduction 115
Many Countrysides 115
The Trials of Capital and Narratives of Social Space 118
The Narrative of Social Space in Rural Realism 121
4 Mussel Slough and the Contradictions of Squatter Capitalism 123
The Commodification of Mussel Slough: Railroad, Speculators,
and Squatters Converge in the Tulare Basin 125
Blood-Money and the Anatomy of Development 130
The Country and the City: From Transgression
to Similitude 137
The Octopus and the Bourgeois Sublime 139
Bourgeois Discourse and the Uses of Nature 148

5 Realty Redux: Landscapes of Boom and Bust 150
in Southern California
Where Is Southern California? 150
From Ranchos to Real Estate 152
The Boom of the 1880s 154
The Southern California Boom Novel 160
Conclusion: Production, a Necessary Evil 173
6 Romancing the Sand: Earth-Capital and Desire 175
in the Imperial Valley
The Problem 175
Engineers and Entrepreneurs 176
Producing the Imperial Valley 178
What a Difference a Flood Makes 179
Imperial Valley Representations, 1: Promotion and
Its (Dis)Contents 181
Imperial Valley Representations, 2: The Winning
of Barbara Worth and the Erotics of Western Conquest 182
Conclusion: Engineering Rural Realism 193
vi CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION vii
7 Take Me to the River: Water, Metropolitan Growth, 196
and the Countryside
Designer Ducts 196
Los Angeles and the Owens Valley 198
San Francisco and Hetch Hetchy Valley 200
Rural Eclipse: The Water-Bearer and The Ford 204
Wither Rural Realism? 213
Conclusion 215
Notes 219
References 235

Index 251
CONTENTS vii
D. W. Griffith, “A Corner in Wheat” (1909). (Courtesy of Kino Film International
Corporation.)
Introduction
The Alchemy of Capital and Nature
Though he was already dead, Frank Norris had a good year in 1909. His epic novel
The Octopus (1901) was brought to the screen by visionary film artist D. W.
Griffith—no other filmmaker has touched it since. Titled “A Corner in Wheat,”
the film is a confident, bare-bones distillation of the novel’s hundreds of pages
into fewer than fifteen minutes of viewing time. It is of course no substitute for
the original, a point compounded by the fact that Griffith drew on a second Norris
novel, The Pit (1903), also a rather long book. Griffith’s work is such a treat for
Norris’s readers because it superbly confirms that Norris was an expert craftsmen
of signature tableaux, devices that regularly punctuated his narratives and that
allowed him to tie together the worlds of meaning he had been summoning up.
Of several exemplary scenes that structure the two novels, one from The Octopus
was perhaps guaranteed to be filmed. This was an especially macabre sequence
involving a conniving grain speculator, who is destined for live burial under the
tons of wheat he has amassed. Thrashing about in a pelting rain of wheat, chok-
ing on grain dust, and trying desperately to stay alive, he inevitably succumbs.
The wheat continues to pile up around him, until only one hand is able to poke
through in a final, gruesome salute. In Norris’s hands, the speculator, also an urban
sophisticate, has tumbled into the hull of a ship while the wheat was being loaded.
In the film, he happened to have plummeted to the bottom of a grain silo. But no
matter the difference in detail, the scene is a brilliant summation of the novel’s
back and forth movements between San Francisco and its startlingly productive
hinterland, the San Joaquin Valley. As such, it establishes a host of disquieting
themes and questions.
For one thing, here is a man who has been profiting without producing: What

sort of economy could properly allow that? Who could call watching the ticker
tape “work,” and why, up to the point of the speculator’s demise, should it have
brought such riches? But assuming this man is actually a legitimate creation of
ix
x INTRODUCTION
his economic environment, and yet still he comes to an untimely end, what sort
of economy would eat its own progeny? Does it need people like this, or want to
do away with them? Perhaps both. Or first one and then the other. For the sake of
the overall good of the economic machinery, perhaps the machine must kill a
portion of itself in order to move on. But move on where? Where did it come from
in the first place and what will be its wellspring in the future? The urban sophis-
ticate, for example, apparently specialized in things “rural.” Was he out of his
element, or was the polis the uncontested master of a far-flung geography? Maybe
the rural is best served by suffering the whims of urban capital and urban aspira-
tions. Or, perhaps we have it reversed; it’s the wheat that has its grasp on the
speculator. It’s rural economy, not urban whims, that make time and place en-
dure, that create wealth, settle populations, and build cities. But what is it about
rural economy that offers attractions to capital and its circuits? And on what basis
would this appeal last?
The kicker is that all these seemingly disparate entities—the speculator versus
his wheat, finance versus production, city versus country—are far more alike than
one might think at first. Speculative profits tend toward the unpredictable, but so
too does the rural economy. Agricultural production is notoriously sporadic.
Bumper crops are followed by lean years, while, in any one year, late frosts or
torrential storms may stunt the harvest: The inconsistencies are legion. Specula-
tors are compulsive and so is nature. What initially seems like the clash of oppo-
sites in Norris’s story, therefore, is better read as the complementary energies of
regional political economy. Somehow, casualties aside, the rhythms of capital and
the rhythms of nature find each other.
It is no stretch, then, to say that lurking behind the image of the speculator’s

death in the wheat, there is more than a hint that conditions transcend this one
individual. The speculator is not just a speculator, nor the harvest just a pile of
grain. When there are speculators, there must be something speculative about
economy itself. And when this character drowns in the harvest, there must be
something risky about nature that needs to be taken into account. (In fact, one
truth behind the mass of grain is that the soil has been mined of its nutrients.)
The point, it would seem, is that capital and nature are webs of constraint and
confinement that must be carefully recast as fields of opportunity. To be sure, the
resulting alchemy can be as volatile as it can be profitable.
In California, these are old and defining themes, nature and capital. Most fa-
mously, they began with gold. Or rather when the gold gave out—for post Gold
Rush California clarifies what those few heady years were all about. When the
placers grew scarce and the hoses that flushed the Sierra hillsides of their riches
grew flaccid, the unity of money and nature in California (what gold most essen-
tially was) was rent asunder, ensuring that desire for more of that unity held fast.
This book focuses on the period during which pride of place and visions of al-
chemy next came to agriculture,
1
and did so by virtue of an enveloping capitalist
economy. A major arena of emphasis here is how—as a desired end—the capi-
talist transformation of California was narrated and represented, by whom and
through what rhetorical means. The result is a work of historical geography, poli-
tical economy, and literary criticism.
Some of what I have written about here is taken for granted now, especially
the explosive growth of irrigation and the fantastic levels of California’s farm
INTRODUCTION xi
output. It is easy to forget, however, that a crop does not only spring from the soil.
Since the 1850s, California agriculture has partaken of the dynamics of a capital-
ist economy whose circuits surrounded and supported, encroached and exploited.
The result was not one countryside but many, each with its own trajectory but all

shot through with the more general processes of capital circulation. It is deeply
ingrained that America’s agricultural regions are places that “settlers” made and
less appreciated that at times money got there first. Then it was money, and labor,
that had to be coordinated, cajoled, and disciplined. For whose benefit? It is doubt-
ful that rentiers and grain kings, orchardists and engineers greeted quite the same
dawns. And surely all (or a large part anyway) of the Arid West by now appreci-
ates the hydrological feats of the last hundred-plus years. But to say that getting
water from where it was wet to where it was dry presented problems is to venture
a serious understatement.
My assumption is that none of those doings had to happen, but were instead
the results of particular opportunities and constraints. I will argue here that a large
part of California’s development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries was structured by the uneasy relations between capitalism and agriculture.
An important theme here is that agriculture embodies capital and simultaneously
resists it. In part one I examine the implications of this for California’s economic
history, as a history of capital, while in part two I do the same for certain aspects
of bourgeois cultural production. (That at least is a convenient shorthand. In fact,
both parts of the book are concerned with political-economic and cultural trajec-
tories.) Pivotal to part two is an engagement with the California novel, a rich re-
pository of geographical imaginations and a densely expressive outlet for the ex-
pression of alchemic desires. In the early 1880s, California writers began to turn
in earnest to the subjects of rural land and water development and its financing.
Along with promotional tracts and the production of certain archetypal landscape
images, some of which are also treated here, their novels were efforts at theoriz-
ing bourgeois economy in ways sympathetic to bourgeois anxieties.
I have turned to this literature, then, not in search of illustrations with which
to decorate the “real” doings of Californians, nor with the claim that literature
“realistically” documents lived experience back then, but with a question: what
did it mean that this fiction was written at all? The idea of turning nature into
money was an ideology that had to be bolstered. And it didn’t solve any problems

so much as state what the problem was.
The framework I wish to propose for the study of these novels and of Califor-
nia is the very phenomenon with which the writings themselves are concerned:
social and geographical processes of uneven development and the circulation of
capital. For my purposes here, uneven development is understood as one of capi-
talism’s calling cards; it is the hallmark of a system that periodically tends toward
crisis.
2
A discussion of three manifestations of uneven development are woven
into these pages. One is temporal—the tendency for capitalist development to be
expressed through cycles of boom and bust, which various polities continually
try to navigate. The second is social—capital develops differently in different
sectors, say agriculture versus industry; it positions groups of people differentially
with respect to the “benefits” of capitalism; and it positions individuals differ-
ently with respect to their relations to circulating capital.
3
The third aspect of
uneven development is spatial—while capital needs a physical produced land-
xii INTRODUCTION
scape for the perpetuation of its own operations, this is capital taken out of im-
mediate circulation, often quite anxiously.
4
Such a landscape—sometimes rural
and agricultural, sometimes urban and industrial, sometimes voiding distinctions
between the two—becomes not only the solution for capitalism’s survival but the
source of some of its most dire problems.
Why the Late Nineteenth-Century Countryside?
Uneven development is always instantiated locally (though it be a multiscaled
process). It alerts us to capitalism as not just a mode of production but a mode of
production that is also about place making. To prize it apart and to see it in eco-

nomic, geographic, and cultural terms demands a sharp focus.
Social and economic historians of California have long recognized that the
1880s were a turning point. Convention holds that the departure away from the
political and economic obsession with mining was definitive. As for a signal event,
some historians prefer to focus on the collapse of the Comstock and the Bank of
California in the mid 1870s, and others on the legal proscription of hydraulic
mining in 1884. The important point is that after the decline of mining, agricul-
ture picked up the slack in California’s economic lifeline. (I review the basic de-
velopments in chapter 1, while in chapters 2 and 3 I isolate two themes for spe-
cial treatment: respectively, the circulation of financial capital in agriculture, and
the circulation of variable capital through migrant labor and the awkward social-
cultural position this implied for farmers as what I call “capitalist laborers.”) The
reconstitution of the economy in the countryside, so clear in the 1880s, was mani-
fest in multiple but related directions: in rising crop production, in the econo-
mies of rural real estate and land and water development, in bold manipulations
of the physical environment, and in an elaborate migrant labor market. Hardly
abstract forces, the events underlying what Frank Norris called the “new order of
things” were riddled with social struggle. Money, too, defined the new order. Nor
was money all an abstraction. Money’s rearrangement in space and its investment
in different economic sectors represented conscious (if sometimes self-deluded)
acts. Investors in California’s cities, primarily San Francisco and Los Angeles,
plowed their profits into the fertile lands of the San Joaquin Valley, Southern
California, and the Imperial Valley. But, in turn, each of these regions generated
its own turnover and reinvested it locally. A portion of these investments, both
local and not, were directed at the development of irrigated agriculture. Irriga-
tion generated a font of wealth and valorized much subsequent diversification of
California’s regional economies. Water, like land, was an essential venue for the
geographic circulation of capital. The hitch was that capital brought to the irri-
gated countryside a turbulence all its own.
In short, no account of California’s experience in the late nineteenth century

can ignore the rise of the “new” agriculture. Agriculture describes not what was
fading from view but what lay, to a substantial degree, on California’s horizons—
and this, curiously enough, following a previous phase of industrialization. Al-
though they were hailed as a panacea for unemployed miners, for out-of-work
urban laborers—not to mention the financial big guns in search of a place to put
their surplus—the state’s farms were lashed to the fits and starts of capital, which
INTRODUCTION xiii
they in fact embodied. And Californians, regularly on intimate terms with the jolts
of boom and bust, came to know it.
If the declining incomes of the 1870s (a decade of mining speculation, failed
banks, and ruination in the stock market) gave agriculture and irrigation their allure
in the 1880s, too much production too soon raised problems again by the 1890s,
until the willful formation of new commodity sectors, new markets, and improved
production and distribution techniques brought California’s producers into the
limelight again. Caught in a classic cost-price squeeze in the 1920s, however, with
the additional debt burden after years of rapid irrigation expansion, California
agriculture, like that in much of the nation, again began a slide into depression
(see the excellent overview in California Development Association 1924).
To the obvious fact that agricultural profits were not won overnight is the cor-
ollary that they were not made in one place. Rural California, as chapters 4 through
7 relate, was not an undifferentiated outback. (See the introduction to part II for
an overview.) Revenues emerged from select locales, with capital shuttling
between them. In their sometimes dramatic moves to plug the gaps of spatially
uneven flows of capital, bankers, investors, and speculators tied these locales
together—for example, San Francisco to the San Joaquin Valley or Southern Cali-
fornia to the Imperial Valley—seeing to it that portions of the money that had been
made in one time and place would appear in the form of credit or venture capital
to help fund rural development somewhere else.
And to the successive historical and geographic “frontiers” of capital is an added
corollary: these were sources of cultural meaning in their own right. There was a

real catch here. Money was perceived to be a troubling and, ironically, meddling
presence to bourgeois culture. I have said that money was not all that abstract,
but, if a small anthropomorphism may be permitted, this ran counter to its fur-
tiveness, that is, the apparently mysterious ease with which it appeared, disap-
peared, and fluctuated in value. This was an affront just as it was the sine qua
non of bourgeois society. Rural smallholders ached for a steady stream of credit
and then strained to master their growing indebtedness. Bankers, speculators, and
railroad heads doled out funds only to wring their hands over payment sched-
ules. The literati and the pulp writers, too, wondered how to map the elusive
geography of money. Time and again what they thought would be perfectly trans-
parent agrarian landscapes turned out to be dense and duplicitous thickets. One
need look no further, perhaps, than to Norris’s The Octopus or Harold Bell Wright’s
1911 bestseller, The Winning of Barbara Worth, to realize that landscape for them
explained little. Instead it had to be explained.
The Discourse of Rural Realism
Land and irrigation development, as wedded to sources of financing and larger
circuits of capital, were eagerly recruited as subjects for California fiction. (I hope
readers will consider it a reasonable balance that while much of this fiction is
today little known, it actually concerns reasonably well known [to historians at
least] events—the Mussel Slough affair, the Southern California 1880s land boom,
the Imperial Valley flood, and the San Francisco-Hetch Hetchy and Los Angeles-
Owens Valley controversies.) In such fiction, novels for the most part, what I call
xiv INTRODUCTION
the discourse of rural realism was concertedly invoked. There, in fiction, because
it was embedded in narrative, rural realism was most seamlessly joined to other
species of discourse, just as its fragility was most easily apparent.
Rural realism is, on the one hand, not unlike what Michael Schudson notes
about the “capitalist realism” of advertising art—both realisms visually ideal-
ize capitalist production and spheres of consumption (Schudson 1984; see also
Marchand 1985). It seems to me that something very like this idealization hap-

pened with a certain class of California novel. I am not summoning realism in the
usual literary sense then (although I am concerned that the urban bias of histori-
ans and theorists of nineteenth-century literary realism be disturbed
5
). Instead,
what I have in mind is the fabrication of a discourse that depicted, subserved, and
responded to the rhythms of the circulation of capital through the countryside.
Arising from that impulse, rural realism was the amalgamation of characters, plots,
settings, and narrator voices mobilized for the purpose of totalizing the ideals of
the liberal capitalist market. Rural realism was the desire to extend that market to
its geographical conclusion, excluding no place and bypassing no one—save those
upon whom “Anglo-Saxon” disfavor fell. It was one of the dream images of white
(mostly) California that its outsized portion of western spoils would bring about
that conclusion.
Apologia for capital though it was, rural realism was, conversely, Janus-faced.
It was, for example, hostile to competing (read urban or eastern) capital forma-
tions. It was also a critique: instead of taking capitalism to task prim a facie, it made
an issue of how to make capital less crisis ridden (temporally, socially, spatially),
or at least make it seem so. Rural realism was a discourse that could see through
reasonably well to some of capital’s repeating, and bound to be repeated, flaws,
but was so borne of capital that its critique stopped short and safe. As such, rural
realist discourse does not so much open a window onto California’s political
economy because it somehow “represented” or “documented” it, but because rural
realist discourse was an aspect of bourgeois political economy.
By the same token it should be noted what rural realism was not. I am not ar-
guing that it was a literary genre. Nonetheless, since the period covered here wit-
nessed the production of what are commonly called the genres of realism, region-
alism, and romance, I explore how rural realist discourse was refracted, aided,
and abetted by those genres, such as I understand them.
6

The novels represented
here (see the list of sources for an overview), I would want to add, are in no sense
reducible to rural realist discourse. Many of them are equally Anglo-Saxon pre-
occupations with supposed racial superiority (at the expense of Latinos especially),
nationalism, and gender. But such preoccupations were hardly inimical to fixa-
tions on the problems of money and class that underwrote rural realism. Quite
the contrary, they helped to reproduce those fixations and counted heavily upon
them.
From Frank Norris and Mary Austin to Harold Bell Wright, the writers who
trained their eyes on the California countryside did not set their sights thus be-
cause the California farmscape was an exotic residual in an otherwise industrial-
ized America. I see these authors as writers who understood what geographer
Stephen Daniels calls the “duplicity of landscape” (Daniels 1987). That is, they
were not taken in by the aesthetic pleasures of the rural to the extent of missing
INTRODUCTION xv
the fact that the rural was the scene of some of the most sophisticated (and for
them, sublime) manipulations of capital. One ought not read, for example, Sarah
Orne Jewett’s Maine idyll, The Country of the Pointed Firs, and Mary Austin’s
cavil about Los Angeles rummaging around the Owens Valley in The Ford and
assume they share the same sensibility, however rural the settings of both books.
Or as Frank Norris’s main character in The Octopus would discover, writers, bred
on sentiment and local color, might gravitate to “pastoral” California, and, intend-
ing to romanticize its marginality, find that the rural was the very picture of every-
thing that was contemporary and modern about the Far West. The economic sta-
tus of the rural differed vastly from place to place in the post–Civil War decades.
In the case of California, the rural was nowhere near being economically residual
and represented futurity in many ways. Its appeal in California fiction was its
economic primacy, rather than its romanticized marginalization, as was often the
case with evocations of the former plantation South in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. In California fiction, then, a new structure of feeling fixated on the country-

side, not because the countryside was being left behind, but because it had be-
come a dominant arena of accumulation.
Why Rural Realism, Why the Novel?
Attention to texts as fully imbricated with the “world outside the text” is no longer
much of a dare, except to those who think no such world exists or to those who
assert that texts have no place in that world. Instead, the exact arrangements and
the finer points are what stick in the craw. While I will not claim to have settled
these imbrications, I will say that my way of thinking through them owes much
to the sort of close readings of narrative and historicity (for me, a historical spa-
tiality) performed by New Historicism (e.g., Veeser 1989), including its extraor-
dinarily patient exegeses of the logics that undergird specific narratives (e.g.,
Michaels 1987).
For New Historicists, when it comes to meaning, plurality reigns. Meanings
may be cultural, social, economic, or political, or some combination of these, but
the point, or one point, is less to keep these domains separate than to expose their
arbitrary boundaries and seek out the projects these boundaries serve in the first
place. For a New Y ork Tim es interviewer, Stephen Greenblatt summed up the New
Historicism as folding the history of texts and the textuality of history into each
other. Lest there be fears of a return to idealism therein, these words are not to be
taken to mean that history (or geography) can be reduced to a set of representa-
tions but that theories of the world must be and have been built with representa-
tions. And it makes as little sense to deny the existence of these as it does to deny
the existence of on-the-ground events. But I take the real critical move of New
Historicism to be that it employs close readings as a mechanism for returning
readers’ attention to the material world. It has the intention of evoking the social
and cultural density that gives birth to texts in the first place, looking to texts not
with the expectation that they will clarify that density and afford a glimpse into
the zeitgeist, but with the assumption that they will bear social and cultural rela-
tions out in language, narrative, and character. Any presumed social theoretical
xvi INTRODUCTION

clarification in literature (let’s say, the presumption that the novel is a diagnosis)
is in the end really a player within those very relations (a socially, culturally bred
diagnosis).
All of which does not necessarily make the task of interpretation any easier.
New Historicism may, for example, make it rather difficult to decide what kind of
“commentary” a given novel offers. It gives rise, for example, to the question of
whether or not it is very meaningful for a novel to register ambivalence about
capitalism when, as Michaels argues, the available array of ambivalences are
constituted by one’s position within capitalism. (I take this issue up in the intro-
duction to part two.) I should say, however, that one poses this particular ques-
tion to certain kinds of books and not others. Perhaps it is especially appropriate
for that stream of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novel that engages
the gritty, crushing realities of modern life (e.g., Bradbury and MacFarlane 1976).
But, as the New Historicist approach will also allow us to recognize, other types
of books would turn the question almost completely around: If writers actually
did want to register their fondness for capitalist political economy, how would
they do it?
7
(In the case of The Octopus, Norris at first takes a critical stance to-
ward capitalism and then, famously, abandons it. This is less a contradiction than
a rhetorical maneuver through which Norris produces his own version of rural
realism.) What would they have to emphasize and what would they feel compelled
to ignore? And if they were to hail capitalist political economy when agriculture
had essentially rescued regional capital (a two-fold conundrum), how might mat-
ters be complicated?
At the surface, rural realist discourse applauds agriculture’s importance for
capital (and vice versa, for in the discourse each was good for the other) in the Far
West. Deeper down, rural realism expresses a structural problem peculiar to agri-
culture’s relationship to the capitalist mode of production. To wit, in the decades
following the Civil War, industrial capitals increasingly took over aspects of pro-

duction—such as implement making and milling—that had been historically rele-
gated to on-farm manufacturing or small-scale, decentralized craft production (see
Pudup 1987). But these ballooning industrial sectors could not replace natural
processes per se (e.g., plant growth and reproduction). In blunt terms, factories
could make a plough but they could not manufacture an ear of corn (see Goodman
et al. 1987). Agriculture was a site that capital could not fully make its own and
was yet that site which capital intently strove to capture—an irony for the mode
of production whose origins were so intensely agrarian. In chapter 2, drawing upon
work in rural sociology, Karl Marx’s Capital, and the work of geographer David
Harvey, I argue at length that this gap created an enormous opportunity for finance
and rentier capitals to develop through American agriculture—California repre-
senting a special case, in that it represents both the westward tilt of finance capi-
tal and the development of some of the most sophisticated financial structures of
the early-twentieth-century United States. That is, if nature posed an obstacle to
one faction of capital, as rural sociologists Mann and Dickinson (1978) insist, other
factions of capital, whose earnings were based on the appropriation of values
through sale of farm credit and mortgages, were busy indeed.
The not-quite duality of capital and agriculture lent to rural realism the formi-
dable energies of ambiguity: agriculture was of importance to and yet separate
from capitalism proper, and here was a gap that was resoundingly productive for
INTRODUCTION xvii
discourse. Because agriculture was not completely capitalist, in the industrial
sense, but because it was clearly articulated with the circulation of capital in the
wider sense, it could be a cultural site for thinking through—and worrying about—
what was desirable in one kind of capitalist trajectory as opposed to another.
8
Moreover, if the glare of industrialization was never quite outshone, neither
was the cultural luminosity of a pre-capitalist rural past. Not quite “sunshine”
and not quite “noir”— apologies to Mike Davis (1990)—the rural realist gambit
could not be ventured lightly. It always signaled the potential displacement of

the myth it competed against and thereby had to also keep alive. Agrarian and
“middle landscape” images, redolent of the historical tensions between the coun-
tryside and the city or technology and nature, have long operated on European
and Euro-American soil, as Leo Marx and Henry Nash Smith once told about. To
California, such images, by simply focusing attention on the hinterland, consti-
tuted a readily available set of references through which the bourgeois ambiva-
lences over, but ultimate desire for, intensified circulation of capital in the late
nineteenth century could gain further expression. In ways that I hope to make clear,
ruminations over the despoliation of older, simpler ways of life gave way in rural
realism to the bourgeois desire for capital’s own redemption by “going rural.” Rural
realism appropriated stock images—of fruited plains, embowered farmsteads, glis-
tening rivulets—only to better assert that the “rural” in rural realism would be no
refuge from capital but would be one of the most desired places for it. (Moreover,
rural realism is more about the dynamics of capital itself, not just “machines in
the garden” [Marx 1964].) More than once are the characters who bring rural real-
ism to life led to the fields and orange groves by bankers and developers rather
than running there to get away from them. Capital could bring the rural into being
and, recursively, would be the better for doing so.
Let us say also that the discourse of rural realism was sustained specifically by
the mode of representation which carried it. Chapter 3 will give a foretaste of this
in its discussion of three short stories written in the early 1890s as a promotional
campaign to encourage urban investment in California farmland. Part two extends
the point: one does not only look for rural realism in novels; one looks through
novels (or other representations) at rural realism. Much can be made of the novel
as a distinct cultural form (e.g., Bakhtin 1981). While it is beyond the scope of
this book to offer a theory of the novel, it is appropriate to say that “the novel”
was a narrative vehicle in which rural realist discourse could be tested among
other discourses. This testing could be prolonged (refuted and reasserted, and
refuted and reasserted again). Rural realism could be developed as an organic, self-
evident presence in characters’ everyday lives; it could be the very mode of story-

telling. It could make the transition from idea and assertion to a sine qua non of
narrative and historical, geographical logic. I’m not sure that any form other than
narrative fiction could hold rural realist discourse up in quite that way.
Stalking the Interdisciplinary Wilds
This book, like any other, is the result of conscious selection—with a larger goal
in mind. I want to better understand the practices of capitalism. These practices
are insistent and many-branched, intentional but often not. While I am loathe to
xviii INTRODUCTION
argue, grand narrative style, that these practices are all-constitutive of motive,
identity, and outcome, it would be foolish to ignore that there was little they did
not brush up against and that there is still much to be learned from tracing their
circuitous pattern.
California and the Fictions of Capital is therefore by necessity a work of hy-
brid scholarship. That it has depended on the findings and insights of disciplines
other than my own field of geography has made for a highly enjoyable venture,
while of course suggesting to me many times the cumbersome nature of academic
departmentalization in the first place. It must be said, however, that for all its
rewards, working across disciplines imposes a double burden. By definition it
requires navigating unfamiliar waters, which to me has meant plying the currents
of cultural and literary studies and American history. Such a search for new in-
sights and their subsequent translation into one’s own project raise the possibil-
ity of vulgarizing the refinements in perspective that only accompany long famil-
iarity with a particular field. So, while it has been my goal to produce a work that
borrows less than it adds something new, I must acknowledge there is plenty of
the former, my desire having been to not have to reinvent the wheel. In this re-
gard, the economically inflected histories of California and the American West,
written by William Cronon, Donald Worster, Donald Pisani, Gerald Nash, Mansel
Blackford, and Richard Orsi, for example, have been essential. Kevin Starr’s non-
stop histories of California are also important touchstones, even if my sentiments
are closer to those of Carey McWilliams.

Potentially riskier is undertaking the second burden, that interdisciplinarians
enter into their labors ignorant of who their audience really is and will be. Sure,
we make our guesses and plot our intentions, but the whole point is to be partly
wrong. (But not too wrong.) We cast the net widely, hoping for a new and unsus-
pected audience, only to overshoot those whose interests dovetail most closely
with our own—from them we learn of our most important sins of omission. Which
is to say that fellow geographers have presented to me the best of guardrails: com-
pass points that indicate room to move and musical notes when I have careened
into the metal. I will never be able to thank Dick Walker and Don Mitchell enough
for timely, thoughtful, and generous readings of these chapters. And this does not
compare to what I have learned from each, both personally and in their published
work, about capital, California style. Many other people have read this book in
whole or in part. I thank them all for their criticism and encouragement: Susan
Craddock, Lucy Jarosz, Mona Domosh, James McCarthy, Bernie Herman, Chandos
Brown, Kirk Savage, Terry Whalen, Bob Gross, Chris LeLond, Sallie Marston, and
Miranda Joseph.
Like many a first book, this owes its origins to a dissertation. Although that
incarnation is quite different from the present one, I still have debts of gratitude
to Dick Walker, Allan Pred, and Genaro Padilla for fostering my thought experi-
ments on economy and culture. Berkeley Geography graduate seminars with
Michael Watts, Allan Pred, and Dick Walker opened up what were the key ques-
tions for me, the ones I keep asking about capital, consciousness, representation,
and the production of spaces where everything comes together and falls apart.
But if seminar meetings had not been bolstered by the wonderfully intense con-
versations and friendships of fellow grad students, nothing would have made
sense. Susan Craddock, Eric Hirsch, Rod Neumann, Lucy Jarosz, Jorge Lizárraga,
INTRODUCTION xix
Alex Clapp, Brian Page, Marcia Levenson, Rick Schroeder, Liz Vasile, Katharyne
Mitchell, and Susan Pomeroy will, I hope, see themselves in these pages.
I am grateful for financial support along the way. A Chancellor’s Dissertation

Year Fellowship at Berkeley gave me a push out the door, while a postdoctoral
fellowship at the Commonwealth Center for the Study of American Culture, at
The College of William and Mary, once again put me in rare company. Kirk Savage,
Elizabeth Thomas, and Grey Gundaker opened their hearts and minds to me. Terry
Whalen, Chandos Brown, and Bob Gross saw that the mind of a geographer could
be a little messy, but they counseled me on this project in ways that I still reflect
on. I am grateful to the Department of Geography at Colgate University for very
generously allowing me use of an office and computing facilities. A Small Grant
from the University of Arizona’s Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Insti-
tute allowed one more summer research trip to California. Then and on many other
occasions the staff of the Bancroft Library has been kind and gracious: I thank Terrie
Rinnie for much needed use of a library carrel and Dave Rez for always being on
the lookout for books that might interest me.
A round of graduate training at the University of Delaware convinced me quite
early that geography, social and economic history, and cultural history belong
together. Edmunds Bunkse, confidant and mentor, taught me things about place
that truly changed my world forever. Lessons in American social and cultural
history and historical geography taught by Yda Schreuder, David Allmendinger,
and Richard Bushman are more durable than they know.
I have had a years-long conversation on economics and economic theory with
Tom Bonomi and similarly protracted talks with Gray Brechin and Jorge Lizárraga
on California history. Here at the University of Arizona, I have had the support of
many colleagues and friends. In particular, my discussions with Marv Waterstone,
Miranda Joseph, and Sallie Marston echo through these pages.
I wish to express my gratitude to family and friends whose encouragement (and
patience) have been more important than anything else: Susan, companion and
colleague for life; George, Sr., the two Suzannes, Tom and Mary Beth, Lane, Jean,
Elaine, and Marsha—no families could be more supportive; and friends whose
ears are warm from listening for too long, Dave, Jenny, Jeff, David, Peg, Sandy,
Carl, Ted, Jane. . . .

Thomas LeBien, Susan Ferber, Lisa Stallings, and Brandon Trissler, all of Ox-
ford University Press, were kind and judicious each step of the way. I am grateful
for David Lott’s meticulous copyediting, for the indexing skills of Dave Prytherch
and Penny Waterstone, and for Mark Patterson’s graphics know-how; I must also
thank the anonymous reviewers who were in enough agreement about what needed
doing to get me to do (most of) it. Any mistakes or oversights, factual or aesthetic
are mine.
Finally, thanks to Penguin USA, publisher of Frank Norris’s The Octopus, and
to International Publishers Co., publisher of Karl Marx’s Capital, volumes 1 and
2, for permission to reproduce extracts of these works. I thank California Farm er
for permission to quote from back issues of the Pacific Rural Press and wish to
acknowledge Edward Arnold, publisher of the journal Ecumene, which printed
an early version of chapter 6 (1.3[1994]: 235–55). Kino International Corporation
kindly allowed the use of its video version of D. W. Griffith’s “A Corner in Wheat,”
while MOMA’s Film Stills Archive supplied the Griffith still for the jacket.

Alameda
Alpine
Amador
Butte
Calaveras
Colusa
Contra
Costa
Del
Norte
Fresno
Glenn
Humboldt
Imperial

Inyo
Kern
Kings
Lake
Lassen
Los Angeles
Madera
Marin
Mariposa
Mendocino
Merced
Modoc
Mono
Monterey
Napa
Nevada
Orange
Placer
Plumas
Riverside
Sacramento
San
Benito
San Bernardino
San Diego
San Francisco
San
Joaquin
San
Luis

Obispo
Santa
Barbara
Santa
Clara
Shasta
Sierra
Siskiyou
Solano
Sonoma
Stanislaus
Sutter
Tehama
Trinity
Tulare
Tuolumne
Ventura
Yolo
Yuba
San Mateo
Santa Cruz
El Dorado
0
100
Miles
California Counties. (Courtesy of Tina Espinoza).
REFERENCE MAPS xxi
0100
Miles
C

a
s
c
a
d
e
R
a
n
g
e
K
l
a
m
a
t
h
M
t
n
s
.
C
o
a
s
t
R
a

n
g
e
s
Peni
nsu
la
r
T
r
a
n
s
v
e
rs
e
R
a
n
ge
s
S
I
E
R
R
A
N
E

V
A
D
A
Chocolate
Mtn
s.
Santa
Monica
Santa
Ynez
S
a
n
R
a
f
ae
l
M
t
n
s.
S
anta
Lu
cia
Mtns.
T
e

h
a
c
h
a
p
i
M
tn
s
.
W
h
i
t
e
M
t
ns
.
In
y
o
M
tn
s.
A
marg
o
sa

Ran
g
e
P
an
a
m
i
n
t
R
a
n
g
e
San
Gabriel
San
Bernardino
Little
San
Bernardino
S
a
n
Ja
ci
nt
o
M

t
ns
.
Gabi
lan
R
a
n
g
e
S
a
n
t
a
C
r
uz
M
tn
s
.
M
t.
D
iablo
R
a
n
g

e
T
r
in
it
y
M
t
n
s.
C
o
a
s
t
R
a
n
g
e
s
S
o
ut
h
F
o
r
k
M

tn
s.
Warn
er
R
an
g
e
Cape
M
endocino
Pt.
Arena
Pt.
Reyes
Monterey
Bay
Pt.
Sur
Pt.
Concepcion
Santa Barbara Channel
S
A
C
RA
M
E
N
T

O
V
A
L
L
E
Y
S
A
N
J
O
A
Q
U
I
N
V
A
L
L
E
Y
MODOC
PLATEAU
Napa Valley
Santa
Clara
Valley
SALINAS VALLEY

OWENS VALLEY
D
E
A
T
H
V
A
L
L
E
Y
Panamint Valley
Mojave Valley
MOJAVE
DESERT
Santa
Maria
Valley
Santa Clara
Valley
San
Fernando
Valley
L. A.
Basin
Santa Ana
Basin
S
a

n
ta
A
n
a
Mt
ns.
IMPERIAL
VALLEY
Shaded area elevation over 500 meters
Land Features of California. (Courtesy of Tina Espinoza).
xxii REFERENCE MAPS
0100
Miles
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Bishop
Hanford
Fresno
Madera
Merced
Modesto
Stockton
Sacramento
Santa Rosa
Oakland
San Francisco
San Jose
Marysville
Oroville
Redding
Eureka
Salinas
San Luis Obispo
Santa Barbara
Ventura

Los Angeles
San Bernardino
Riverside
Santa Ana
San Diego
El Centro
•
Visalia
•
Bakersfield
•
Colusa
•
•
Chico
Orland
San Diego
Santa Ana
Los Angeles
Buena Vista Lake
Tulare Lake
Kern
Kings
Kaweah
Tu le
San Joaquin
Tuolumne
Stanislaus
Mokelumne
American

Bear
Yuba
Feather
Susan
Honey Lake
Pit
Klamath
Lake
Tule Lake
Klamath
Trinity
Sacramento
Stony Creek
Shaded area elevation over 500 meters
San Gabriel
Salton Sea
San Joaquin
Merced
Cache Creek
Lake
Tahoe
Intermittent Lakes
Perennial Lakes
Major Rivers, Lakes, Towns, and Cities of California. (Courtesy of Tina Espinoza).
REFERENCE MAPS xxiii
0100
Miles
Approximate Location of Irrigated Areas of California, 1900. (Courtesy of Tina
Espinoza).
xxiv

REFERENCE MAPS
0100
Miles
Approximate Location of Irrigated Areas of California, 1920. (Courtesy of Tina
Espinoza).
REFERENCE MAPS xxv